Featured Basic Sciences Research Images

The following images have been generated by students, postdocs, staff, or faculty affiliated with Basic Sciences. Each one is the product of hard work, both technical and creative, and has been selected as the banner image for our newsletter, Basically Speaking. If you are interested in having your image featured in our newsletter and in this gallery, please submit it here.

Alexandria Oviatt – Osheroff Lab

Alexandria Oviatt, a graduate student in the lab of Neil Osheroff, works with bacterial topoisomerases, enzymes that regulate supercoiling and that can remove knots and tangles from DNA. This image is a 2D gel that she generated after testing the ability of a Staphylococcus aureusgyrase (a type II topoisomerase that can introduce negative supercoils) to relax DNA. DNA can be electrophoresed on agarose gels to discern its supercoiling state, but positively and negatively supercoiled DNA run at similar speeds. To get around this problem, Oviatt runs her gels in two directions, which helps separate the different DNA species. This 2D gel shows a time course in which the gyrase relaxed positively supercoiled DNA (top left) before introducing negative supercoils (bottom right). Image courtesy of Alexandria Oviatt and Elizabeth Gibson.

Featured in the August 2019 issue of Basically Speaking.

Caroline Cencer – Tyska Lab

There is more to this artwork than meets the eye: this kaleidoscopic image is actually a single immunofluorescence slide that has been rotated three times about a corner. The artist and researcher, graduate student Caroline Cencer (lab of Matt Tyska), uses enterocytes to study the maturation of the intestinal brush border. In this image, the microvilli (magenta) are coming out of the screen toward the viewer.

Caroline Roe & Justine Sinnaeve – Ihrie Lab

Image courtesy of Caroline Roe and Justine Sinnaeve.

This image shows a glioblastoma tumor that was frozen, sectioned, and stained with metal-tagged antibodies; 7 (out of more than 30) markers are shown in this particular visualization. This image is exemplary of a pilot project between the labs of Rebecca Ihrie and Jonathan Irish to bring imaging mass cytometry (IMC) to Vanderbilt. IMC allows researchers to identify 30-35 different markers to get a nuanced understanding of the types of cells that are present in a single sample, like with mass cytometry, except that IMC allows them to discern structural and spatial relationships between cell subsets. Roe is a program manager in the Irish lab and Sinnaeve is a graduate student in the Ihrie lab.

Nilay Taneja – Burnette Lab

Embryonic Stem Cell Colony
Shown is a colony of human embryonic stem cells showing the actin cytoskeleton (magenta), myosin motors (cyan) and DNA (yellow). Embryonic stem cells, that give rise to all tissues in the body, hold great potential in designing cell-based therapies for multiple diseases. Studying the cytoskeleton of these cells helps us understand how they respond to their mechanical environment and how that affects their ability to both retain their identity or differentiate into specific cell types. Technique used- Confocal microscopy, large image stitching.